U.S.

How a High School Teacher Is 'Gamifying' World News

A new game called Fantasy Geopolitics (think Fantasy Football meets Model United Nations) is radically changing the way high school students in Minnesota are interacting with the news.

In 2009, Eric Nelson, a Social Studies teacher at North Lakes Academy Charter School in Forest Lake, Minn., developed Fantasy Geopolitics after recognizing that his attempts at getting his students to engage with the class weren't quite hitting the mark.

“When I started teaching, the average ninth grader looked like a zombie in class,” Nelson told Mashable. “One night when I was lesson planning, I took a break and literally checked my Fantasy Football team and I had this realization that I was learning a lot about the NFL — things about football and the NFL I wouldn't have otherwise learned.”

The next day Nelson proposed the idea to the class. At first, the idea was met with skepticism, mostly due to the students’ lack of familiarity with how Fantasy Football works. But after the students became familiar with the format of the game, they warmed up to Fantasy Geopolitics — both as a game, and as a new way to learn.

“My students started asking to do more with [the game]. They wanted to make trades, form alliances and so I just started listening," says Nelson. "Whatever they wanted to do to control their own learning experience, I did it. Now, they playfully trash talk about their countries and become fans of those countries, which spurs them to want to learn more. It’s almost like they are trash talking each other into learning more."

"I'm 'gamifying' learning. I'm 'gamifying' news to get them over the hump and not see reading the news as some difficult task."

As for the format of the game, Fantasy Geopolitics is simple. It starts with a draft session, during which students select a team of three countries (the U.S. and China are banned due to their domination of the news) and then the players track stories about those countries in the news.

Using the Times Developer Network API, provided by The New York Times’, Nelson created a website that tracks how many times a country is mentioned in the news, and students get one point for every mention.

A picture of the Fantasy Geopolitics map that shows a country's current point totals according to how many times they've been mentioned in the news.

Since its introduction into Nelson's classroom, the game has expanded to other classrooms across the U.S. After being accepted into 4.0 Schools’ launch program — an organization of innovative educators exploring ways to redefine and re-imagine schools — Nelson spent last October and November taking the game to schools in New Orleans, La. What's more, this year North Lakes Academy gave Nelson the opportunity to teach a semester-long elective course dedicated to Fantasy Geopolitics.

“The [semester] elective has been awesome so far,” says Nelson. “We're testing the new application of the website, exploring trends, talking news and examining geopolitics more deeply. We're planning on having a draft during the Winter Olympics and having some more fun learning in that context.”

Currently, Nelson is running a Kickstarter for Fantasy Geopolitics to fund his goals of expanding the format and technology of the game. Nevertheless, Nelson still wants to promote the game, first and foremost, as a tool for the classroom.

“I used to be reluctant in saying this, but Fantasy Geopolitics revolutionizes how students learn about the world,” says Nelson. “It transforms my students whereby they become teachers and I become a better learner. It’s not just some game that I play with kids, [and] that potential excites me.”

Mashable
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